Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2008 - (Page 59)

HOGAN JAZZ ARCHIVES, TULANE UNIVERSITY King Oliver’s Creole Band at the Pergola Dance Pavilion, San Francisco, 1921. in a series of 20th-century “roots” movements that persist to this day. Chief among their valued treasures were King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band recordings of 1923, which contained Armstrong’s debut and, more importantly, represented a pinnacle of the New Orleans style of ensemble improvisation. But despite all of these accomplishments, Joe Oliver’s name is not among the first rank of New Orleans jazz icons — no airports are named in his honor and no statues have been erected in his memory. The only two chapterlength accounts of his life and music, one by Frederick Ramsey, Jr., the other by Martin Williams, are currently out of print. It should be remembered, too, that the cultural establishment of his time largely ignored Oliver. Its attention was instead focused on Paul Whiteman, the society bandleader who had named himself King of Jazz and whose high-profile 1924 concert in New York’s Aeolian Hall, billed as “Experiments in Modern Music,” represented a major effort in the campaign to absorb the innovations of jazz in forms of music already accepted as culturally legitimate. The evening’s program, for example, featured both an orchestral rendering of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s 1917 novelty hit, “Livery Stable Blues,” and the world premier of George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” a jazz-colored composition embodying all the grandeur and sophistication of the best European classical music. Remembered best by musicians and New Orleans jazz specialists, Joe “King” Oliver has never been accorded the kind of recognition bestowed on musical peers like Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton, or even Edward “Kid” Ory. Even Buddy Bolden, a semimythical figure whose music is forever lost to us, looms larger in the traditional New Orleans jazz pantheon. And that roll call was swelled significantly after World War II by the New Orleans jazz revival that brought back to public life “living legends” such as trumpeter Willie “Bunk” Johnson, clarinetist George Lewis, trombonist Jim Robinson and the many musicians associated over the years with Preservation Hall. AT THE HEIGHT OF THE JAZZ AGE, CHICAGO WAS AMERICA’S MOST DYNAMIC URBAN SETTING, AND JOE OLIVER’S NEW ORLEANS ENSEMBLE WAS THE MOST SOUGHT-AFTER BAND IN THE CITY. A TRAGIC FIGURE Certainly Oliver’s historical reputation has not been helped, either, by the fact that the Creole Jazz Band recordings represent the pinnacle of a career that continued without much distinction for another 15 years, or that those recordings place him in Prohibition-era Chicago instead of New Orleans. But a major factor for his relative lack of fame surely must be laid at the doorstep of the writing of jazz history, which consigned Joe Oliver early to the role of tragic hero, and later reduced him to something like a footnote in the creation myth of jazz. In the first case, it was his misfortune to pass away just as Fall 2008/LOUISIANA CULTURAL VISTAS 59

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2008

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2008 Contents Friends Editor’s Column Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities New Orleans Immortelle The Historic New Orleans Collection Highland-Fairfield: The Historic Heart of Shreveport The Ogden Museum of Southern Art Perils of the Mississippi River Louisiana Foodways Harvest of Life King Oliver: The Forgotten King of Jazz Louisiana Architecture Jazz Notes Louisiana State Museum Eye of the Storm Louisiana Association of Museums Soul Resin Bookstand Sound Advice Forum

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Fall 2008

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